Category: St. Francis

It’s been nearly a year since I first traveled overseas. While there, I worked with refugees near the Syrian border. The intervening year has brought plenty of surprises (both fortunate and not so fortunate), and, as sad as I am to admit it, after so many months of the humdrum repetition of daily life I often forgot some of the things I learned there about what love really means.

For World Refugee Day I want to remind myself and others of a situation that we often, whether consciously or unconsciously, drive to the background of our lives. I also want to remember those that touched my life in that hot July, who continue to live, work, and dream as I write this.

One of the greatest problems I run into when people talk about the refugee crisis is that we fall into “statistic speak.” Treating those affected by it like some homogeneous set of numbers, we toss around the awfulness of something like ‘7 million displaced people’ with a disturbing lightness of mood, following it with little more than a shaking head and a canned comment indicating a casual remorse. The sheer magnitude of independent lives affected should crush us. Instead, we respond with a unilateral and simplified “pity” toward ambiguous suffering. In my own experience, the suffering is overwhelmingly individual. While others may just recall numbers and news clips, I remember faces and names.

One of the refugee camps I spent some time in last July

I met mothers who’ve suffered losses I can’t imagine, I met fathers who exhibited constant love for their children, I met young men close to my age trying to make the best out of a horrible situation, and I met children who, despite all the pain they suffered or violence they survived, laughed, played, and made this silly American’s first classroom an extraordinary (and often exasperating) place to work in.

And, in thinking about them all over again, I wept.

At the most basic level, the lives of those I met were incredibly familiar to me. They shared many of the same basic desires, hopes, and flaws that populate my own hometown. In the midst of enormous divides, I was reminded that at the core of every man, woman, and child is a universal nature that I often neglect to notice among my own neighbors. Each one embodied an enormous soul of humanity, warts and all.

They don’t need our pity, they need our understanding. I believe any one can tell you that a romance can’t get much further than infatuation without mutual understanding. There are similar rules for the higher, more selfless forms of love; to love others more effectively, we must earnestly seek to understand them.

You may or may not have a refugee population in your own city, but you can take a few minutes to learn about them no matter where you are. You can watch a few videos on Youtube, watch a film on Netflix or Amazon (I can recommend a few, including 50 Feet From Syria, The White Helmets, and The Return to Homs to understand the Syria crisis in paticular) or read some quick articles on not only the problems but the creative, inspiring solutions nonprofits and businesses around the world are coming up with.

Today, even as media coverage of the refugee crisis continues to play second fiddle (if not third or fourth) to the American political circus, it doesn’t look like it’s stopping anytime soon. As Syrians, Rohingya, Yemeni, South Sudanese, and many other groups continue to seek safety from prolonged, devastating conflicts, we must remember that we have a humanitarian duty (especially those among us who claim to be Christians) to love those suffering around the world for no other reason than they are human beings like us, images of awesome divinity and elemental mortality. Whatever you can do, whether it’s praying, sharing, learning, or giving, I challenge you to show some love toward refugees today.

To close, I want to encourage you with a quote from the Prayer of St. Francis (which may or may not have actually been written by him) in which the author cries to God:

“-grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled, as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;to be loved, as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive.
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned.”

Love comes first. Remember that.

If you can afford it, consider giving a one-time gift (or even better, become a regular donor) to one of the following charities helping to build back lives both here in the states and abroad:

“He executes justice for the orphan and the widow and shows His love for the alien by giving him food and clothing. So show your love for the alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt” -Deuteronomy 10:18-19